I've known the name Chill Wills since I was about six. My family lived in San Antonio for a couple of years and Wills made an appearance at a shopping center. My mother didn't know about it. She just happened to be there with my brother who was 2-years-old. Wills picked him up, saw that he didn't like it and put him down immediately and went on with his appearance. I doubt anyone remembers it but me.
This is the first movie I've seen Chill Wills in and he was better than I imagined in a supporting role. I guess I thought he would be sort of a cross between Denver Pyle and Dub Taylor, but he was pretty good.
This was Sam Peckinpah's first movie, just one year before Ride the High Country and five years before The Territorial Imperative was published. It wasn't exactly a Sam Peckinpah movie. He had to follow a script he didn't write and it wasn't overly violent. Maureen O'Hara disliked him. She thought he couldn't direct. He forgot to film an entire sequence vital to the movie, he killed a snake for one scene and it says somewhere that he kept walking around scratching himself.
The music was bad. I never really liked Maureen O'Hara. I never really liked Brian Kieth either, but I liked him in this. Steve Cochran smiled too much as a gunslinging rapist preying on a bereaved mother. Strother Martin was sort of repellent in a small role, but being sort of repellent was his thing. Billy Vaughan as Maureen O'Hara's son.
Everyone hates each other in this thing. I was rooting for the poor Apaches.
Available on Pub-D-Hub and Amazon Prime if nowhere else.
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